Exhibits & Projects Celebrate The 150th Anniversary Of Bushnell Park

HARTFORD — The public is invited to join the fall festivities surrounding Bushnell Park’s 150th anniversary, including a new exhibition at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. “Celebrating Bushnell Park” is on view until November 14.

With original paintings, sketches, photographs, vintage postcards, and even a monumental silver punchbowl from the U.S.S. Connecticut, the exhibition recounts the history and purpose of Hartford’s central municipal park. 

Contrary to urban myth, Bushnell Park was not designed by Hartford native Frederick Law Olmsted. Instead, credit goes to Jacob Weidenmann (1829-1893), a Swiss born architect and one of America’s pioneering landscape designers. Hired in 1860 as Superintendent of the Park, his first task was to survey the grounds and plot the landscaping.

Weidenmann’s plan for Bushnell Park, along with his designs for other municipalities and a private clientele, was published in his 1870 book, Beautifying Country Homes. Later he moved to New York, where he often collaborated with Olmsted, but his mortal remains are buried in Hartford (at Cedar Hill Cemetery, the first “modern” burial ground and one that he designed).

In the 1940s, when the Park River was placed in a conduit beneath Bushnell Park, Weidenmann’s design was modified by the Olmsted Brothers (Olmsted’s son and stepson).

The sculptors whose works dot Bushnell Park’s landscape are also celebrated in the Wadsworth exhibition. Among them are Evelyn Beatrice Longman (Mrs Nathaniel Batchelder) and her work “The Spirit of Victory, The Spanish-American War Memorial” (1927); the self-taught Enoch Smith Wood, who received an early commission from the state legislature (1893-95) to sculpt a likeness of Colonel Thomas Knowlton (who led Connecticut troops in the War for Independence at the Battle of Bunker Hill).

Also on view are John Massey Rhind’s “Corning Fountain” (1899); and the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch (1886), a Civil War memorial by the architect George Keller and the sculptors Casper Buberl and James Kitson.

A recent addition to the park’s public art collection is the abstract stainless steel sculpture “Harmony” (1990) by Norwalk resident Charles O. Perry (born 1928).

The exhibition also delves into intriguing views of Hartford before there was a central park. In October 1853, the Reverend Horace Bushnell, the popular pastor of North Congregational Church for whom the park is named, proposed the creation of a publicly financed park in the city center.

The next month, the City Council unanimously approved spending $105,000 to do just that, and in January 1854, the expenditure was approved by Hartford voters from all classes, 1,005 to 682.

Bushnell and others influential in the history of what was originally called City Park are featured in the exhibition, including the banker Colonel James E. Bolter, the poet Lydia Sigourney, and Hartford Times co-owner Alfred E. Burr.

“Celebrating Bushnell Park” was curated by local author and cultural historian Wilson H. Faude. The exhibition culminates the Bushnell Park Foundation’s yearlong series of institutional collaborations observing the Park’s sesquicentennial.

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, at 600 Main Street in Hartford, can be reached at 860-278-2670 or www. WadsworthAtheneum.org.

Related Events

On September 30 and October 1, Trinity College is presenting a symposium entitled “Bushnell Park at 150: Legacies & Lessons.”  (The school was originally situated on land now occupied by the State Capitol building.)

Louis Menand, the winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in History, is the keynote speaker. Participants include Robert B. Mullin, co-author of The Puritan as Yankee: A Life of Horace Bushnell; Charles Beveridge, co-author of Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing the American Landscape; Tom Condon, “Place” editor and columnist at The Hartford Courant; and Sanford Parisky, managing director of the Bushnell Park Foundation.

For information about the symposium call 860-297-2125 or visit www.TrinColl.edu.

The Bushnell Park Foundation has launched a campaign to reestablish The Overlook, the prominent yet graceful terrace designed by Weidenmann that had provided a visual and physical connection between the State Capitol building and Bushnell Park. 

When completed, the lower level will be the setting for a new piece of art in the park, “Puerto Rican Family Monument” by the sculptor José Buscaglia Guillermety (born 1938).

For information on this project call 860-232-6710.